A colourful, incomparable colossus, a work of breathtaking, staggering genius and no mistake.

Not much here is too likely to blow up on the airwaves... it's too dirty, too ugly, too hard, and too Real.

'De Stijl' is just about better song for song, but the sheer vitality and energy of this one alone makes 'Elephant' their most accomplished record to date.

No one musical entity, or group in the world comes close to the sum of their parts.

Most of the hooks are appalling - a few, sung by Skinner, like 'Such A Twat', and opener 'It Was Supposed To Be So Easy' are enjoyable, but when he lets his mates croon soupily all over his beats, shit gets distinctly unpleasant.

This album is jaunty, scruffy, carefree and accomplished.

[A] confusing but entertainingly eccentric package.

2002's first REAL classic.

'Alice' finds the twisted surrealisms of Lewis Carroll's relationship with Alice Liddell offering both refuge and escape for the usual Waits suspects: vagabonds, low-lifes and beautiful lunatics.

The stuff of magic.

A beautiful, engaging, enchanting record.

Here Dylan has written a great part and acts it out beautifully. And, as usual, everything is out in the open but nothing, absolutely nothing, is revealed.

It's not so much her actual rapping skills but her keen ear for a devastatingly simple track structure that makes her stuff so satisfying.

'Songs For The Deaf' is a triumph, a record forged with fire and sweat in the pits of Valhalla... It is the very essence of Rock.

His best music has a kind of timbral vulnerability about it that makes you want to reach out and kiss his computer better.

Recalls the overwhelming splendour of the Go-Betweens at their finest.

What blessed bastardry is this? It's bloody brilliant, that's what it is.

Ejstes... has an innate sense of melody, rhythm and the skill to play some pretty natty fat bass splurges, and psychedelic, peripatetic spider-like drum rolls.

Fascinatingly dense, soulful and utterly divine.

Manitoba is a lunatic and a fool, and his strange music, crafted from nature and machine and birdsong and the wind and the air and the seas and THE GODS... it is a fine, fine thing indeed.

This is a Warp-inspired wonderland of intricate glitches, murmuring glacial low-end smoothness, and subtle, filmic orchestration.

An unfinished album, and also a beautifully accomplished one.

'Abattoir Blues' is weirdly full of wonderment, and - get this - 'The Lyre of Orpheus' is even more joyful! And they both kick Nocturama's arse full of buttonholes.

I don't know when a voice touched me as wholly as Antony's does.

When 'Arular' works - a good three-quarters of the time - it's unmissable.

With 'The Argument' arriving awash in the unmistakably sinewy and elliptic post-hardcore sound Fugazi have made their own (sonically at least) this is more or less business as usual.

Bottom line: One dimensional ghetto fodder this is not.

Tender melodies, modern scrapes and traditional beauty merge into a gently unfolded whole that touches the soul with its silky aesthetics.

Fearsomely post-post-punk, appealingly brazen, and ambitiously tight, they have indeed made The Album That Saved Indie.

This veers between quite good and bloody rubbish with only a couple of flashes of brilliance here or there.

The most worth-the-wait long-awaited album in the world... ever? Could be...

In their quest for paper, The Roots have lost their way.

Bugger if the Furries haven't gone and exceeded their own expectations with this, a total stonker of a new record that cannot fail to excite and delight on, oh, so many levels.

'Sound Of Silver' is the album of the year.

Unlikely to be defined by any passing scene, Herren seems likely to go his merry way in the way production auteurs do, body-swerving ham-fisted attempts at pigeon-holing or categorisation.

This is not just an album that can be appreciated by fans of the avant-garde, pop and rock alike but a genuine fuck you to the people claiming modern music has nowhere left to go.

Few artists can master the trick of capturing ambience and atmosphere without resorting to cliche. M83 are among the few.

Basically, it's the album they'd always promised us they'd make; consider 'The Decline...' British Sea Power's entrance pass to the ranks of the truly mighty.

A triumph of style and content, a precious thing and proof positive that acid is well good for you.

I defy anyone not to seep happiness through the pores of their skin once in possession of this record.

LCD Soundsystem have set 2005's bar very high indeed and they sound like they’ve barely got started.

Calexico provide drama, atmosphere, tension and tenderness in the 16 tracks here, not only because they have soul but because they're so good at their craft.

A confident, rampant holler that bristles with the energies of prime new wave, the proselytising vigour of the most barnstorming white soul, and the wry, cerebral kickback of most of the artier artists of the last thirty years.

Most of all, though, what we find ourselves thinking of when enjoying 'The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place' - and, rest assured, readers, it's an enjoyable experience right the way through - is the magical spangliness that elevated the Cocteau Twins from absolutely all of their more ghettoised contemporaries way back when.

A patchy, flawed effort.

'The Mysterious Production of Eggs' is unmalicious, delicious classical indie with enough originality to mark it apart, and what it lacks in jaw dropping charisma it somehow makes up for with songwriting and instrumentation of the highest order.

On 'Fox Confessor Brings The Flood' Neko's voice and sheer poetry of her song-writing make hyped also-rans like Jenny Lewis look like hot-pant wearing desperados, proving to her rivals and beyond that style and substance aren't mutually exclusive.

The quality is high throughout.

KW's album can only be thought of as even remotely good while we don't have a young, hungry KRS One, RZA, Rakim Allah, Gift of Gab or Ol Dirty Bastard to challenge him.

There's a rural beauty, crafted by man and machine, in places as exotic as an orchid.

'Mesmerize' is a frantic, frenetic brutal assault on the senses. It mashes up the most intense hardcore, the fiercest fire-starting punk rock with ridiculously complex riffing that’s like amphetamine prog.

Intelligent, melodic, poetic and funny, so this is what Now sounds like eh?

'The Drift' is an extraordinary piece of work, even more challenging and expansive than Scott Walker's startling last album.

This is Mogwai distilled to their essence, and the result is an album of huge power, emotional depth and feeling, with vocals submerged under a claustrophobic blanket of effects and guitars battling with viola, cello, violin and piano. It's just as Eno as it is S***t, and all the greater for that.

'Streetcore' shows he was still producing vital music to the end.

This is the sound, throughout, of a remarkable institution doing all the things they do best and sounding as alive as they ever have.

Lanegan's lyrics are poetic, well thought out and devastatingly honest, making this more a serious artistic account than some braggadocio bullshit. And then add to that the fact the music is just fantastic.

But the use of the twin-pronged vocal attack as an instrument in its own right is never relied upon to be the sole weapon in Blood Brothers' arsenal. Intelligence is mirrored in the deployment of the music behind it.

Dicing with folly at every stage and coming out victorious, 'Blinking Lights...' is sprawling, galling and downright enthralling.

Though loquacious, 'Boys and Girls in America' is a record full of maddening stream of consciousness lyrics that amble without direction, and narratives with no real stories or purpose.

She has issued a treasure. She has floored us again.

As far as style and technique go, it's more of the same; quite literally MORE. 'Kish-Kash'? Mish-mash: Basement Jaxx make dancefloor monsters, Frankenstein's monster stylee.

If there's a snag it's not that the album exactly dips - it's just there's a lack of variation of pace, meaning it can be difficult to consume in its entirety at just one sitting. But, with a little patience, it comes alive.

What makes Bunyan's return such an unqualified success is that, unlike so many of those she's influenced (Patrick Wolf excluded) she doesn't come within a country mile of the briar patch of cloying kookiness.

Most of these songs sound like they're taking down whole walls of your average sonic cathedral and replacing them with huge stained-glass windows with a billion pieces in a hundred thousand colours that sparkle like angel's tears when the sun hits them, like. Yes, it is a bit evangelical. It's reverent.

Too much of 'Geogaddi' just rests on the Boards' well established tricks.

Björk has transcended any pop plinth she may (incorrectly) have been placed upon, to become, probably, our greatest contemporary female vocalist since Diamanda Galas.

Rancid are currently the best and most consistent and most observant rock n roll writers on the planet.

The Books make the incongruous harmonious, the silly sensitive and the complex easy to understand. 'Lost And Safe' will sweep you up into an aural world where, for once, beauty and humour co-exist.

Despite its many wondrous moments, 'Feels' is not a record for everyone.

It is undeniable that they can produce beautiful sounds with their equipment, it's just that they do not seem to be able to orchestrate it to any purpose afterwards.

Songs that shamble along in the gutter but can still bite your ankles if pushed.

There are enough pinnacles of musical achievement married with subtle storytelling to justify the scale of this album.

Fourteen listens deep, this is still getting better. All but a rap classic. You know, Kanye's good, but really, fuck that. Ghost for president.

Your new favourite record.

Anyone else tries this, it'll be like being force-fed Sunny Delight by a battalion of pastel-pashmina'd Pokemon on My Little Ponies. In the hands of The Flaming Lips, with their stellar inventiveness and inquisitive sweetness, it's just utterly noble.

As a headphone album, 'These Were... The Earlies' is something of a stunner.

An epic alt.rock symphony that takes the band’s trademark sun-kissed melodies and brass flourishes and melds them into something altogether darker and achingly beautiful. Unsurprisingly, it’s an approach that more than pays off.

'Multiply' sees the flavours of Al Green, Curtis Mayfield, Prince and Sly Stone twisted into 2005 with subtly inventive touches and modern production suss.

So once you get behind the relatively unobstructive and emotive voice, what you have is the sound of NYC circa '77 pushed through the ramshackle indie filter.

It's painstakingly layered and often lush, but sometimes scrubby and miserably sparse.

One of those classy records that will sound good forever, no matter what you do with it.

As long as you are open, you will love this album. It will be as important to a lot of people as 'The Queen Is Dead'.

The whole thing makes for a masterclass in enigma and economy.

It sounds oh-so-fashionable, but it isn't simply an instance of über-credible semi-celeb DJ/producer wanking all over his decks and a handful of records no one ever heard of; every single track is not only quality, but accessible.

Confrontational, clammy, brimming with confidence... ‘Royal Society’ is as majestic as its title implies.

A quite beautifully realised album.

They actually sound like they've elected to live in a cocoon full of aromatic candles, a huge collection of musty records, some drugs, some books, and a collection of mid eighties Peel sessions alphabetically labelled on TDK C90s.

It's not quite the second coming or even the first for that matter, but 'Food & Liquor' should leave you feeling sated and occasionally elated.

'Love' is trying to be all things to all people and suffers for its lack of ruthlessness and direction.

There is nothing groundbreaking about this LP; it's just classic.

The sheer enveloping bliss elicited by hearing the album in one sitting (especially in public – 'Faking The Books' is a headphone masterpiece and no mistake) leaves one wishing it were a whole lot longer than its taut 40-minute duration.

It just feels that amidst his bare and heartfelt explorations of life and the old wooden box wherein we all end up, Brock has learned to dance, learned to allow himself a smile.

It’s just a shame that after seven plays, it’s still a bit tricky to remember what any of the tunes go like.

'Think Tank' is an extraordinary record that pushes boundaries and sets new standards.

'Bang Bang Rock & Roll' is as clever as it is funny as it is entertaining. It's the most original independent album in years.

There isn't a bad song on this album.

At the end of the day this is a bit more of a grower than the last one, but is easily as good.